Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What, exactly, is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor”, an implacable fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes?
In this instant number-one best-selling novel, Jonathan Franzen charts the mistakes and joys of these intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world. An epic of contemporary love and marriage, Freedom is a deeply moving portrait of our time.
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"The style of writing was interesting if a bit tedious. The way it would be in one characters point of view for a hundred or so pages and then switch to another character was interesting. However, there were times when I wanted that switch to come quicker and yet the chapter just kept dragging by. The author did a good job of getting me interested into one of the characters story and into what was happening to them, only to then switch everything around and start talking about distant family issues. I found it to be frustrating, but it did add background to why the characters ended up the way they were. The book did a great job at showing how everything fell apart, how the characters felt during it, and the reasons for allowing it to fall apart. I enjoyed the book, but would probably only recommend it to someone with time to invest."
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Kyle (4 out of 5 stars)